Voyager 1 is down to two working science instruments, and the fix that just bought its twin, Voyager 2, another year of power is now being tested on a probe NASA says no longer behaves quite like its sibling
Voyager 1 is still crossing interstellar space with six computers holding about 68 kilobytes of memory between them — less storage than a single compressed photograph on a modern phone
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 with a suite of 10 science instruments — as of 2026, only two remain switched on, and the spacecraft's nuclear power source loses roughly 4 watts every year, a slow drain that is now deciding what humanity still gets to learn from interstellar space
How the Voyager missions rewrote planetary science, tested the limits of 1970s engineering, and became humanity's longest-running experiment in institutional patience